It's a red herring, anyway. People have been replacing classic BSD and SysV initialization schemes since 1992 [1], but systemd was the first to penetrate the scene quite massively for a plethora of reasons that no one can seem to agree on.
Honestly that's unfair to XP/Windows Server 2003 which had much better supervisor capability than sysvinit provides.
I'm not sure how you could, with a straight face, claim that sysvinit fits this description. It does many things, none of them particularly well.
The only thing this accomplishes is ensuring no progress is made, ever.
That's also when I learned systemd was running an entire virtual fstab layer. Because, you know, /etc/fstab just isn't good enough anymore.
I would file a bug on systemd mentioning this behavior. But I like the fact that that my usb wifi card will not screw my system.
What was intelligent about that?
I don't need intelligent tools, I need tools that do what I say! That's why they're tools, damn it!
My machines start much faster with systemd too, which is a nice side effect.
Do you prefer sysvrc over -say- OpenRC, Upstart, runit, etc, etc?
That's really a shame. Systemd is almost comically bad.
I've seen a lot of political stuff, and a lot of claims that sysvinit ain't broke so we shouldn't fix it (which makes little sense to me), but haven't seen a good resource discussing technical merits, or the lack thereof.
I could probably do it, but in all honesty, the "debate" has been so spoiled that I doubt anyone would take it seriously. My relatively technical article about FreeBSD and launchd (which had only one error about where plists were parsed, a relatively minor gripe in the text) was near-universally misunderstood and derailed by commentators who went on rants tangential to what I actually discussed. Same with my init history article.
But, if enough people want to, maybe I'll bite the bullet. Not sure if I'd like to subject myself to it, but I think I might end up writing a rather long treatise if there's demand and I do go with it.
There are other pages out there claiming to be neutral overviews, but they generally just take a neutral tone while rehashing the same long-debunked myths and spreading FUD.
The specific thing I like about systemd is the init replacement. It's just so much better! Automatically tracking daemon child processes, even detached ones. Supporting all the different modes daemons work, so I don't need to write yet another damn clean-up-all-the-children function in a SysVinit script. It's wonderful.
But systemd is a lot more than an init system and I don't really have strongly formed opinions on those.
* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/
Another persons writings to read, for similar reasons, is Ian Sutton, who is the bloke who did SystemBSD:
Here's an example:
http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html
1. It was not a good bug report. 'Do not parse "debug" command line parameter' is not a bug. The actual bug is "assertion in systemd-journald" which is a clear regression, but independent of kernel parameters. According to comments 17 and 22, it was promptly fixed.
2. According to projects process, discussions about design are to be done on the mailinglist and not in the bug tracker. Most commenters violate this.
3. No systemd dev explained why they parse the debug parameter.
4. Sievers closed the bug report without explicitly acknowledging the assertion problem.
5. The kernel devs (especially Linus) are too hot headed and misread this. Systemd caused and fixed (!) the assertion problem.
Literally everyone with a clue in the matter seems to hate systemd with passion[1].
A long-term Debian Maintainer quit over the issue[2].
Linus himself (as you quoted) seems more than a little annoyed by systemd and its developer.
And yet somehow systemd made its way into all major distros...
Linus called out on some behaviour. That is not him saying that people should stop developing. It's him saying stop this behaviour.
Christopher Barry is most certainly not a troll.
As shown in the LKML and Debian debates, the systemd infestation was firmly opposed by nearly everyone outside the 'vested interest' RedHat filter bubble. And still is.
Some high profile names would be Eric S. Raymond or Patrick Volkerding (creator of Slackware).
Debian has been forked over this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devuan
That is not him saying that people should stop developing. It's him saying stop this behaviour.
It's him finally calling Kay Sievers out for being incompetent and an asshole. Which was long overdue.
Sadly it's by far too late and will very likely not change a thing about systemd's "break and extinguish" strategy.
Systemd will continue to break other peoples projects in its effort to replace every mature service implementation with a hacked up systemd imitation.
At least until, hopefully, the major distros finally acknowledge their mistake and roll this disaster back.
You can't just go "attack surface" and have said anything useful, nor can you point at volume of code if that code is actually needed. All criticisms of systemd usually depend on people completely ignoring the very serious problems you can't solve with sysvinit and which do make actual, practical systems less secure (i.e. cgroup process isolation is amazing, and a lack of real service management is a huge problem and any service management is going to be running as root period. Yet there's been a real claim that service management is "what your sysadmin does". Why even bother with computing then?)
systemd as base system will certainly happen, regardless.